So This Is Great Britain?

Come May it will have been 11 years of Labour party rule in the UK. It has been a good run for Labour even if they haven't yet matched the 18 year run of the Tories before them. But I wonder if the inevitable cracks are beginning to show.

First you have the creep of moronic silliness well documented by the BBC:

A story based on the Three Little Pigs fairy tale has been turned down by a government agency's awards panel as the subject matter could offend Muslims.
The digital book, re-telling the classic story, was rejected by judges who warned that "the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

Becta, the government's educational technology agency, is a leading partner in the annual Bett Award for schools.

The judges also attacked Three Little Cowboy Builders for offending builders.

The book's creative director, Anne Curtis, said the idea that including pigs in a story could be interpreted as racism was "like a slap in the face".

The CD-Rom digital version of the traditional story of the three little pigs, called Three Little Cowboy Builders, is aimed at primary school children.

But judges at this year's Bett Award said that they had "concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

The Three Little Cowboy Builders has already been a prize winner at the recent Education Resource Award - but its Newcastle-based publishers, Shoo-fly, were turned down by the Bett Award panel.

The feedback from the judges explaining why they had rejected the CD-Rom highlighted that they "could not recommend this product to the Muslim community".

They also warned that the story might "alienate parts of the workforce (building trade)".

The judges criticised the stereotyping in the story of the unfortunate pigs: "Is it true that all builders are cowboys, builders get their work blown down, and builders are like pigs?"

Ms Curtis said that rather than preventing the spread of racism, such an attitude was likely to inflame ill-feeling. As another example, she says would that mean that secondary schools could not teach Animal Farm because it features pigs?

Welcome to Labour's Britain, where the "feely-crats" rule. For a country with the intellectual history it has the pervasiveness of such nonsense is simply shocking. We expect to encounter a bit of this sort of stupidity in the United States because we have such a long history of letting nut jobs do what they want as long as they don't bother other people too much. But in today's England they are institutionalizing this feeble mindedness, and letting the loons set governmental policy to the point of regulating content in children's literature.

It's a joke.

And it seems to be the kind of joke that is causing reactions.

I recently picked up a CD by a British band that came as a huge shock to me. The band is called The Holloways and their album is called So This Is Great Britain? When I first listened to it I thought it fell into the usual left of center point of view that you simply come to expect from English music groups, but on closer inspection it actually represents a deeply conservative reaction to the state of the UK today.

The title track offers this:

So this is Great Britain? Welcome aboard
a sinking ship that's full of shit and someone's nicked the oars
With failing false economies and anti-punk autonomy
our once unique identity's been washed from our shores.

Right off the bat you have a call to recover identity in the ideas of Britishness that has somehow been lost.

But it doesn't end there, the song continues to castigate the country for its seeming meaninglessness:

Yeah this is Great Britain, so lets raise a jar
Just look at Georgie Best and how it got him so far
the prince of pleasure lost his crown for getting high and getting down
The alcoholic anti-hero's visibly scarred

Come on Great Britain, lets sleep around
sex is so much fun we better spread it around
It really is infectious and your soul is nothing precious
so grab some meat and treat your loins to that by which they're bound

Whatever I was expecting from them, I certainly wasn't expecting the Holloways to be worried about the state of peoples souls. However, it is a recurring theme on the album. On the track "What's The Difference?" we hear:

What's the difference between you and me?
You've got no mercy, you've got no sympathy.
You're soul is trapped, mine is free
That's the difference between you and me.

Or this from the track "Fuck Ups":

Well a thirty three year old grandma comes up to me and says
'My family's gonna take over this council estate if we keep on giving birth
at this rate.
I'm gonna be a great, great, great grandma by the age of 75,
and I will be clad in fake Burberry, I don't care if I'm dead or alive.'

All the fucked up fuck ups fucking me up with their stories and their tears
and their cigarettes and beers.
I think they're killing me with their grim reality,
If your life is going wrong you better sing along.

I cannot think of a view that has less sympathy with the leftist orthodoxy on the "victim hood" of the poor, or a view that screams more for an ethic of personal responsibility and accountability.

The track "Reinvent Myself?" sums up a Labour weary viewpoint nicely with lines like:

I can't follow ideology,
I'm proud of my identity.

and:

I can't follow our 'democracy'
they don't practice but I tell you they preach
they don't learn but they think they can teach
and I think Mr. Blair is causing anarchy
you can hear him singing God Save The Queen
with The Pistols like a sex machine.

The entire albums reads like a litany of the failures of the left in Britain, and as such it is a breath of very fresh air.